


This I Swear By The Stars

by HellenHighwater



Series: I Will Never Rest [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Excessive use of musical lyrics, Gen, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, which is sort of appropriate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 13:47:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20779583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HellenHighwater/pseuds/HellenHighwater
Summary: "I swear I will find him, that I may see him safe behind bars. I will never rest!"Javert makes a very foolish oath, and finds he has no choice but to keep it.





	This I Swear By The Stars

He doesn’t know why he does it. It’s foolishness, pure stupidity, but he’s angry. He’s been thwarted again, tricked out of his prey when he thought he had him at last. He’s angry and tired and stupid, and there’s no one but the stars to hear him.

The stars hear him.

It’s enough.

* * *

He doesn’t notice at first. He’s never been one for regular hours; there is always something afoot, some godless criminal who must be chased, and Javert has always slept only when his body gives him no other choice. He comes down off the rooftop, still simmering with anger, and goes about his paperwork. There’s always paperwork to be done. He keeps at until sunrise, when an alarm whistle calls all available officers to a scuffle in an alley near the station house. After that it’s a footchase through the back streets after a garrotter, and the unexpected capture of a pickpocket, and then a dozen other small crimes and the paperwork that goes with them. Before he realizes, it’s sundown again, and he’s not stopped to catch his breath once.

He goes back to the stark little room where he keeps his meager possessions and lays down, waiting for the tide of exhaustion at the back of his mind to drag him under. He lies prone on the straw mattress like a corpse, but his mind is ticking restlessly over the facts of a recent spate of burglaries. He turns the cases over and over in his mind, making connections and planning his next steps, and suddenly the sun is rising and he has not slept.

He has a shift, so he puts on his uniform and goes to the station house. His normally prowling gait is dogged with exhaustion. He spends the day in a foul mood, and returns eagerly to his room in the evening.

Dawn breaks through the window, pouring terrible golden light over Javert in his bed. He has spent the whole night in feverish contemplation of his cases. Only then does he realize what he’s done.

He swore by the stars, and they will hold him to his course.

* * *

The seasons turn.

There are always rumors. The underbelly of Paris knows the coppers who will take bribes and the ones who will see you jailed for trying (and there’s always more of the former than the latter.) The gamins know which ones are too lazy to give chase and which ones will follow you into the sewers and over the rooftops. And there are always rumors that everyone says can’t be true, but can’t help believing anyway.

The gamins tell each other that Inspector Javert never sleeps. That day or night, he dogs the criminals of Paris like an unquiet ghost. His skin is grey and tired, and his eyes sunken in his face, but he follows after, always. At dawn and dusk, at noon and night, Inspector Javert patrols.

Inspector Javert, they say, is the law. Implacable, tireless, and inhuman. He never rests.

* * *

There is a man bound behind the barricades, and he watches as the revolutionaries weather the night.

Some of them try to rest. Others rearrange the mounded furniture and torn up cobblestones. Others pour bullets and pack powder. A few sing.

The man bound at the barricades watches one man particularly. His hair is whiter than the stripe of the revolutionaries' home-made flag, and his broad shoulders remain unstooped by age. He moves with a slight drag to one leg.

Javert watches him. Even if he could sleep, the cruel ropes would not allow it. Despite his uncomfortable posture, just before the brink of suffocation, he sits with awful alertness. There is a light in his eyes that has not gleamed there for many sleepless years. He watches like a cat watching a bird through a windowpane, wanting with every fiber of his being to hunt what he was made to hunt, and knowing that he cannot. He watches, feet away from seizing the only thing that can give him rest, and sits awake through the long last night of the barricade.

When the barricade falls in flames, Javert is not there to see it.

* * *

Javert stands over the river Seine and looks at the sky. The stars are covered with heavy clouds, waiting to wash the bloodied streets of Paris with rain.

He doesn’t know if the starless sky is a kindness or not. Perhaps the unchanging stars have turned their gaze from him.

He has been confronted with choice for the first time, and he cannot escape it. He has spent a lifetime trudging forward on the only path he sees. Now his eyes have opened—weren’t they always open?—to the truth: there has always been more than one path, and he chose the wrong one. He contemplates the only rest—the final rest--that may be left to him. He knows, with unflinching certainty, where that final rest will take him. If he falls, he will fall as Lucifer fell. He sets aside his hat and badge and steps onto the parapet, back straight and head bowed.

He falls.

* * *

The water hits him like a cannon shot, claws viciously through his lungs, sinks teeth into the iron wool of his greatcoat and drags him down. He sinks into the black depths, waiting for the darkness to close over him, for the pain to pass into stillness. Or maybe the frigid burn of the river will become the sulfuric heat of hellfire.

Instead, he drifts deeper and deeper into the dark water, like a comet falling through space. He feels a hideous sort of peace as his ears roar with the muffled sound of rushing water. 

His eyes are open. There is no starlight in the Seine, and he does not drown.

* * *

When he drags himself from the cloying waters of the river, the sky has broken open. Rain sluices down over the city, and the streetlamps glitter off every gleaming surface. Javert is heavy with muck from the river and his lungs burn with water. A galaxy of stars has fallen into every puddle; the twinkle of lamplight paves the streets in nebulae.

Javert climbs to his feet and begins to walk. He cannot return Valjean to the bagne, and he cannot rest.

* * *

He patrols the empty streets in a haze. Every star winking at him is a condemnation. Eventually, his legs direct him to his apartment with the force of long habit. He finds himself standing in front of his bookshelf. It is heavily stocked with law books, to stave off the endless waiting nights. He stares at the spines blankly.

He is bound to Jean Valjean. By his oath, and by the debt owed for his own life, he is bound.

He cannot fulfill his oath. Whatever hope remained is gone. Javert knows that he will not rest as long as Valjean lives, and perhaps not even after. He wonders if he’s bound himself to a terrible immortality. Will he watch the endless nights and endless days, toiling like the prisoners of Toulon, without even the mercy of death?

In the blackest depths of despair, there can sometimes be a dreadful cheer. There is a certain freedom in hopelessness. Javert contemplates the eternal misery of his own making, and sets to work.

He has been shown that he has choices. He might as well make them.

* * *

Javert has always hated reading, and does so now with a sort of loathing fervor. He spends his days in the drudgery of police work, in poor favor with his superiors after the delivery of his suicide note. He spends his nights in battle with his collection of law books, forcing a mind unused to thinking into new exercise. Javert’s has always been the way of the law, and he knows that there must be a way to his aim within these books.

The seasons turn and return, and Javert procures a pardon.

* * *

Jean Valjean, Javert knows, lives in a house behind the high crumbling walls of Rue Plumet. It took Javert a little while to find it after Valjean moved out of Rue de l'Homme Armé, but he has all the time in the world. He never rests, after all.

Javert often passes by in the early hours of the morning, when even a wily old convict cannot catch his watcher. Javert reflects, with the weary amusement of a hunter whose prey is out of reach, that Valjean is quite comfortable in his overgrown little fortress. The ornate wrought-iron gate gives only a limited view into the wild garden. Javert has the pardon folded carefully into an oilcloth pouch, and can see only the rustling of branches that suggest someone might be at work in the rosebushes. He crouches to slide the pouch under the hostile bars of the garden gate. There’s no need to show himself to Valjean; he’s sure the convict would only be frightened to find Javert at his heel again.

The pouch slips from his grasp onto the flagstone path, where Valjean will surely find it before he goes inside. Javert withdraws his arm from the gate and stands.

As he rises, he catches sight of Valjean through the bars. He’s rising as well, standing up from behind the rosebushes, and there’s a pale yellow petal caught in his white hair. _He looks content,_ Javert thinks, just before he collapses into unconsciousness for the first time in more than a decade.

* * *

Javert wakes.

It should be an alien sensation, after all these years, but it isn’t.

The morning sun is a warm, gentle golden heat against his skin, and the soft fabric of clean sheets whispers as he stirs. The air smells like flowers, and he slowly opens his eyes to see a vase of yellow roses and an oilcloth pouch sitting on a little side table. Beside them, a white-haired old man sleeps in a threadbare armchair. The window beside him is open, and the sky outside is pale blue. A single star gleams low over the rooftops of Paris.

Javert smiles, sinks back into the pillow, and rests.


End file.
